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Will supercomputers always be faster than a workstation?

When code is optimized for use on the supercomputers, significant speedups compared to a workstation can be expected. Determining why one of MSI's machines seems to be slow may require looking at what you are running or under what circumstances you are running it. There are many factors affecting how quickly a job runs.

The MSI supercomputers are shared resources. Processes such as those requiring communications across the system can experience delays due to other user activity.

Processes using only a single processor may not always get better performance than on your local machine; you can vastly increase speeds by parallelizing your jobs. To make the best use of MSI's resources, work with MSI's consultants (help@msi.umn.edu) to optimize your code for speed.